More than 100 supporters turned out for a Beverly Hills fundraiser for long-shot GOP presidential candidate Fred Karger on Sunday night.
Tickets for the fundraiser, which was held at realtor Michael Libow’s famous “Witch’s House” — a whimsical mansion and tourist attraction built in 1921 for an historic Culver City movie studio and used in several silent films — ranged from $100 to $2,500.
“We had a terrific turnout,” a buoyant Karger told Battleground Blog in a late Sunday night interview.
Karger said that Redondo Beach Mayor Mike Gin, who recently lost a bid for the Republican nomination in California’s 36th congressional district, and openly gay Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, a Democrat, were among those who attended his fundraiser.
The Beverly Hills event was the second major fundraising event for Karger in the past five days. On Thursday, the first openly gay candidate to seek a major-party presidential nomination held a fundraiser in San Francisco featuring special guest Mike Manning of MTV’s “Real World DC.”
Karger, who plans to hold additional fundraisers in Chicago and New York, had raised $266,611 as of June 30 — far more than any of the other so-called “second-tier” candidates such as former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer and former two-term New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson — and nearly half as much as former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, once considered one of the most prolific Republican fundraisers in the country. In 2006, Santorum raised nearly $26 million in his losing bid for a third term in the U.S. Senate.
Karger has put more than $230,000 of his own money into his long-shot campaign.
Despite a recent appearance on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show and a full-length profile on the front page of the Washington Post’s Style section earlier this year, the 61-year-old Karger remains largely unknown to the vast majority of Republican voters, but he hopes to remedy that with a surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary early next year.
Karger, who has visited New Hampshire far more than any other GOP presidential candidate and will be making his seventeenth trip to the Granite State this weekend, recently leased a 100-year-old, fourteen-room house in Manchester. It’s painted white. He plans to live there for the next seven months.
“We’re calling it our New Hampshire White House,” said Karger. “It’ll be a perfect place for some of our out-of-state volunteers to stay. We can also hold all kinds of events there.”
Karger, who cut his political teeth as a young teenager during Nelson A. Rockefeller’s unsuccessful bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 1964 — long before liberal and moderate Republicans became extinct — and later served as a senior campaign advisor to Presidents Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, arguably has more experience in presidential politics than anybody else in the field.
“I have worked on nine Presidential campaigns; this would be my tenth,” he said as he quietly embarked on his seemingly impossible quest for the White House almost sixteen months ago. “I have managed dozens of other campaigns all over the country, and would bring that wealth of experience to my own candidacy.”
That experience is slowly starting to pay off.
Acknowledging that he’s still very much a long-shot, the easy-going and amiable Karger nevertheless said that his dogged efforts in the Granite State are beginning to yield results, as evidenced by an organization of nearly 200 volunteers, many of them college students — a grassroots army larger than those assembled by some of his better-known and more lavishly-financed Republican rivals at this early stage in the campaign.
In late March, his young supporters propelled him to an unexpected victory in the St. Anselm College Republican Straw Poll in Manchester — a contest in which he narrowly defeated GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney by five votes out of 322 votes cast.
“Now, if we can only break through and get into the debates,” he said.
Follow Us